Good Workplace Health Promotion Programs: Personal Wellness

Wellness might be the fatal flaw in your Workplace Health Promotion Program. Is Wellness part of your strategy? Does workplace wellness stop when your workers leave the office? 

Wellness Continuity

If workers don’t have the tools to pursue health and wellness on a Personal level, then it becomes easy for them to “fall off the wagon” and slide back into a unealthy lifestyles. If you have a walking program, for example, it should encourage workers to build walking routes near their homes, perhaps with the cooperation of the neighborhood association or coworkers who live in the neighborhood. 

Workplace Health Promotion Programs: Always on Your Mind 

Your Workplace Health Promotion Program coordinator should have “vacation wellbeing” as part of their job description. In other words, you don’t want a Workplace Health Promotion Program to stop at the boundaries of the workplace campus. Instead, integrate Personal health and wellness with your Workplace Health Promotion Programs. 

This will benefit the Workplace Health Promotion Programs in two ways: 

it lowers the chance that the staff member will come back to the office feeling unfit, overwhelmed and unable to resume their Workplace Health Promotion Programs; and

it shows that their employer is just as invested in their Personal health and wellness as they are 

Like a marathon, Personal health and wellness is a long-term venture and it’s challenging for anyone to do in isolation. Simply put, it’s easier to maintain your state of health when you know others are depending on you and watching your Personal performance. It’s easier to stick to an exercise program when you have a jogging partner who wakes you up when you oversleep, or spots you when you’re lifting weights. 

Similarly, it’s easier to stick to your Workplace Health Promotion Program when you know your employer is supporting you and wishing you the best. 

Don’t Dictate Personal Health 

Just as Wellness surveys serve a vital function in building a Workplace Health Promotion Program, it’s imperative that you involve workers in designing an off-site wellness strategy. No one enjoys being told what to do, but everyone enjoys having assistance in tacking tough problems. Make it clear that workers are in charge of their own health and wellness. Your role as their health management partner is to support, advise, counsel, provide resources and information. 

Of course, don’t forget that part of Personal health and wellness responsibility is to provide good health risk assessment baselines so workers can proceed safely on the road to better physical fitness. 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under Health and Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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